The White House released President Obama’s original birth certificate Wednesday.
The surprise release follows recent and sustained remarks by businessman Donald Trump, among others, that raised doubts as to whether the president was born in the United States.
White House spokesman Jay Carney is expected to speak more about the birth certificate Wednesday morning.

Wow. Guess their internal polls showed that Trump was really hurting their guy.

White House spokesman Jay Carney says Obama felt the debate over his birthplace had become a “sideshow” that was bad for the country and political debate. . . .
“The president feels this was bad for the country, that it’s not healthy for our political debate,” Carney said.

Note that the long form doesn’t have any mention of religion at all, which was one theory as to why Obama was supposedly “hiding” it, nor does it list anyone else as Obama’s father, another speculative bit of nonsense peddled by the birthers. The place of birth box is checked as within city or town limits, signed as thus by the attendant to the birth.
This conspiracy theory should have died three years ago. Now, maybe we can focus on all the ways Obama is failing as President.

Having dismissed the whole controversy as silly from the outset, and having mostly ignored it ever since, I was amazed at how much traction it got when Trump started pounding it in interview after interview.

“I’m taking great credit and you have to ask the president, ‘why didn’t he do this a long time ago? Why didn’t he do it a long time ago?’ When Hillary Clinton was asking, when everybody was asking, why didn’t he do it? It’s shocking. It’s shocking,” Donald Trump said at a press conference this morning on President Obama’s birth certificate.

Donald Trump: Not Just a Kook, an Effective Kook.

UPDATE IX: David Frum refers to Birtherism as “the racialist aspect of the anti-Obama movement,” which is rather a large leap. I always compared it to the various strange conspiracy theories about Mena Airport and/or Vince Foster that flourished during Bill Clinton’s first term.

In politics, some people are always more interested in throwing out spooky charges of criminality or fraud than in arguing over policy. You saw this during the Bush administration, with the stuff about Halliburton and Iraq, the claims of rigged voting machines in Ohio, the “Plamegate” controversy and all those wild fantasies about Karl Rove getting indicted.